Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Accountability Goes Bye-Bye As Senate Torture Report Finally Is Released

The
release today of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence
Committee's report on the CIA's network of secret prisons where
terrorism suspects were tortured with the approval of President Bush and
his henchmen in violation of American law and the Geneva Conventions is
surely one of the greatest anticlimaxes in American history, as well as
the last hope of accountability for what I have come to call the Bush
Torture Regime.

Virtually
nothing in the 524-page summary, while scathing, is new. Its impact is blunted because it is heavily redacted so as
not to identify individual CIA officers and agents, embarrass foreign
governments who rolled out the red carpet for Uncle Sam's torturers, as
well as a juicy detail here and there.

As shocking as the revelations
that Americans routinely used Nazi torture techniques may have been at
one time, and in the absence of evidence that torturing suspects
produced valuable information, let alone lead the U.S. to Osama bin Laden, something that the Senate report notes, the steady drip-drip of magazine and
newspaper articles, blog posts, International Red Cross reports,
lawsuits and the occasional if rare statement by a fearless public
official has blunted its impact some 13 years after the 9/11 attacks
unleashed these horrors. Remember Abu Ghraib? Still revolted by it? I didn't think so.

Nevertheless, the report stillwas stomach turning, especially in detailing the CIA's interrogation techniques, which were approved by the agency's medical staff.

Beyond waterboarding, to which many more detainees were subjected than the mere three the CIA claimed, detainees were imprisoned in small boxes, slapped and punched, deprived of sleep for as long as a week and were
sometimes told that they would be killed, their children maimed and their mothers sexually assaulted. Some were subjected to medically unnecessary "rectal feeding" -- a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations
described as a way to exert "total control over the detainee."

The report, which was compiled by Democratic staff members of the Intelligence Committee with no Republican help after its initial stages, further confirms that the CIA was beset by infighting, dysfunction and deception. The torture was so extreme at times that some CIA
personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior
agency officials to mind their own business and carry on even after one detainee was murdered.

Forget
about Bush, Vice President Cheney and the government minions who sought
to put a veneer of respectability on the use of brutal interrogation
techniques when, the report notes, they were completely out of the loop, then denied their use and scrambled to distance themselves
from the legal jabberwocky they concocted to justify these techniques, being called to
account.

As recently as Monday, Cheney defended torture as
"absolutely, totally justified."Republicans with a few
exceptions, notably Senator John
McCain, who himself was tortured for years in a North Vietnamese prison,
say the report is a partisan hack job while the right-wing media machine swung into action, acting as though the report and not the torture itself was bad for America, as well as claims that the report would "alienate" America's much-needed allies.

Bush was roused from his
post-presidentialsomnambulance to join former intelligence officials in
challenging the report's conclusions even before it was released
although those conclusions are beyond reasonable dispute.And if they and Cheney had no problem with torture and actually believed it to be "humane," as the former president famously put it, why do they now have a problem with releasing the report? Of what are they so afraid?

Meanwhile,
Attorney General Holder was instructed by President Obama to consider prosecuting only those who actually tortured since its use had been
approved by CIA leaders and the Bush administration. No criminal
charges were brought.

Why
have I and everyone else who has closely followed the torture regime
and its fallout correctly assumed that no one of consequence would be
held accountable for this darkest of eras?Because anyone
who thought that Obama, having said boo about torture while campaigning for president in 2008, would denounce it after taking office was engaging
in fuzzy-wuzzy liberal thinking. For one thing, the new president
understood that denouncing, let alone going after
Bush and his enablers for their crimes, would scuttle any
chance he had of forging a bipartisan consensus for his ambitious
first-term agenda. But even this Obama supporter is deeply
disappointed at how unwilling the president has been to lay bare the
regime's excesses even if stopping short of even suggesting its
architects should be prosecuted.

Obama's endorsement, by his silence, of the CIA's lengthy obstruction
of the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of a report without redactions is nothing less than protecting the perpetrators and legitimization of that agency's vile
practices. His defense of CIA Director John Brennan, who led the
campaign to stymie release of the report while tacitly
approving the rogue agency's own spying on the Senate committee, makes
farcical the president's statements that he believes that the U.S. should hew
to international law, including the Geneva Conventions.

America's moral standing in the world community was squandered during the Bush interregnum. That Obama has allowedthe release of a report that has been watered down by some of the perps themselves, puts that standing beyond repair. Yes, some of the men tortured by the CIA were dangerous -- very dangerous -- but the CIA's gruesome tactics have provided a ready recruiting tool for terrorists and further exposed American soldiers, journalists and others to the enmity that our refusal to come to terms with these depravities will provoke.

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About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.